The field of the disclosure relates generally to secure network communications, and more specifically to methods and systems for efficient and secure communications within a wide area network (WAN).
To access a wide area network (WAN), a series of network routers and switches (collectively referred to herein as “network devices”) are used to connect user computing devices and host computing devices to the WAN. The WAN may connect devices at a plurality of remote locations and communicate through the Internet. Securing the communications between these locations is a high priority; however, in many cases this can be expensive and/or time consuming. As new computer network security technologies are developed, many of them require specialized hardware. This specialized hardware may not work with existing systems requiring computer network operators to remove potentially necessary hardware that does not interact with the specialized hardware.